An Effortless, Bizarre-Brilliant Way to Improve Boxed Cake Mix

Boxed mix, especially when it involves Funfetti, has a place in our need-cake-with-little-effort hearts. But Amy Erickson from OhBiteIt has a trick that will seriously improve the taste of resulting cupcakes: melted ice cream. When mixing the batter, just do a simple one-to-one substitution, replacing the water with your favorite flavor of (melted) ice cream. For her first experiment, Amy uses snickerdoodle. From there, just bake them as you would ordinary, non-ice cream batter cupcakes.

This isn’t the first time we’ve seen melted ice cream deployed as a secret ingredient. Ice cream genius Jeni Britton Bauer has added it to everything from chili to scallops, but we like this idea for its sheer simplicity.

Amy calls these cupcakes “the best thing that has resulted from my laziness yet,” which is quite a statement considering she also has an entire series of incredibly easy deep-fried everything from tequila to candy corn.